Harvey, we have said, was childless; his wife, though we have not the date of her death, he had certainly lost by this time. His only surviving brother Eliab was rich; his nephews were prosperous merchants and on the road to the independence and titles which several of them afterwards achieved: he, therefore, determined to make the College of Physicians not only heirs to his paternal estate, worth, at that time, 56_l._ per annum, but to bestow it on them in free gift during his life. This purpose he carried into effect by means of a formal instrument, which he delivered to the college in the month of July, 1656; the special provisions in the deed settling one sum, by way of salary for the librarian, and another sum, for the delivery of a solemn oration annually, in commemoration of those who had approved themselves benefactors to the college, and, by extension, who had added aught to the sum of medical science in the course of the bygone year.[27] Having thus accompanied Harvey over so much of the way in his mortal career, let us, before proceeding further, briefly advert to his WRITINGS, to the influence they had in the republic of letters during his life-time, to the fruits they have since produced, and to the impression still made on the mind that holds communion through their means with the mind that dictated them so many years ago.--The intellectual endowment of a man necessarily appears in his writings; it is not always from them that so true a conception of his moral character can be formed. Harvey, however, though in his long life he accomplished but a small fraction of all his literary designs, has still left us sufficient from which to form an estimate of him as a philosopher, as a physiologist, and it may also be said as a man. Let us take a brief survey of his writings, then, and wind up our account of his life with such personal notices as we can gather from contemporaries, or as we can infer from his own conduct and written word. ON THE HEART AND BLOOD. Harvey’s great work, though by no means the largest in bulk, is the one on the Motions of the Heart and Blood. It has been said, happily, by a recent critical writer, that “men were already practising what Bacon came to inculcate,” viz. induction upon data carefully collected and considered; and it would not be easy to adduce a more striking example of the way in which ultimate rational truth is arrived at by a succession of inferences than is contained in Harvey’s Essay on the Heart and Blood. Had Bacon written his Novum Organum from Harvey’s work as a text, he would scarcely have expressed himself otherwise than as he has done, or given different rules for philosophizing than those which he has laid down in his celebrated treatise.[28]